jeffreyrequadt wrote:Could you give some examples of how you supplemented Mounce's BBG with more whole-language comprehension stuff?
You could always pick out the Greek students at Bible college. Everywhere we went, we carried our vocab words on a little ring to memorize/review them. In the line at the dining hall all the Greek students were flipping through their ring of memory cards. But that’s not the way a child learns language. I haven’t seen many toddlers carrying around rings of memory cards! LOL
One of the principles that we teach in our language acquisition course is “never learn a word by itself.” Always learn it in the context of a sentence.
A great tool for doing that is something called T.P.R. which stands for Total Physical Response. For T.P.R. ideas check out:
http://www.tpr-world.com/
Here’s how T.P.R. might work for learning nouns in Spanish. I find a bilingual Spanish speaker who would be willing to help me learn some nouns.
The first step is “point and listen.” It goes like this:
I point to an object and he tells me in Spanish what it is using a whole sentence like “that is a ball.” I keep adding objects one at a time. I also go back to the previous ones until I feel like I am comprehending the nouns. At this point I am not comprehending the whole sentence structure but the nouns are beginning to make sense. I’m in control so I can go as fast or slow as I want. When I have 5 objects that I think that I know then I ask him to quiz me.
The second step is “listen and point.” It goes like this:
He will ask a question in Spanish like “where is the ball?” I respond by pointing at the ball. He tells me right or wrong depending on how I do. Of course I have to ask him first what the Spanish words for right and wrong are. He asks me these questions at random so that I’m not just following the sequence of objects in order.
The goal is to learn from 15 to 20 objects. At the end, I will record him quizzing me (at random) so that I can review the objects later.
You can also do this for adjectives, and verbs.
So to learn the vocab words in Mounce, I tried to apply this technique using PowerPoint. I tried to find pictures or clip art for the nouns such as angel, man, world, heart, etc. Some of the abstract nouns were a bit of a challenge!
So in PowerPoint I had pictures of these objects – let’s say 5 nouns. Let’s say the first object was ἄνθρωπος. I had a picture of a man and a sentence in Greek that says “This is a man.” We kept going over the pictures and Greek sentences until we felt like we knew the objects.
Then as a quiz I had a second PowerPoint. The first slide would have the question written in Greek “Where is the man?” Then you click and all the pictures disappear except for the picture of the man. Also the question fades out and a statement in Greek fades in saying “This is the man.”
Okay, that’s a REALLY long explanation. But that kind of gives you an idea of how we learned much of the vocab that goes with each chapter in Mounce.